How important is it for ensembles and orchestras to engage in performances outside of the typical concert environment? With a seemingly endless number of works commissioned and premiered every year, one could continue to experience new music without ever straying from the concert halls. Although cross-artistic endeavours between music and arts institutions are creating new and exciting performance environments, more often than not collaborative endeavours fail in their ability to communicate the relationship between mediums clearly and faithfully. Uniting different art forms into a single artistic experience is often seized as an opportunity to take music out of the concert hall and into more unorthodox performance spaces: do we need to see reputable music ensembles engage in projects with other art forms, or should organisations be created with this type of practice at the heart of their work?

This year's Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music were plugged-in, wired-up, mixed-down, line-out. Scarcely a main-stage concert wasn't amplified, at the very least. More often, new works synthesised spatialised sound design, video material, lighting and electronics in high-tech, high-concept performances.

Tracing moving circles (100 circles for the mind)

Brett Dean's interests in writing his new cantata The Last Days of Socrates were both political and sonic. Coming across an old edition of philosophical dialogues by Plato with this title, the composer was taken particularly by The Apology in which Socrates's trial on a charge of ‘being a menace to society’ is dramatically recounted. Following his condemnation to death by the 501-person jury, the last dialogue in the collection Phaedo revisits Socrates in prison awaiting execution. Dean certainly has form both as a politically motivated composer – his Pastoral Symphony (2000) was a protest against the soullessness of modern living – and one with an interest in blending ancient and modern. One of his breakthrough pieces, Carlo (1997), pits sampled Gesualdo against strings to wonderful effect.

Throughout the 2014 International Summer Course for New Music, the correlations between Darmstadt's scientific and artistic nuclei resonated. In his ‘Greeting’ note in the Summer Course programme booklet, the Mayor of Darmstadt, Jochen Partsch, describes the Summer Course as ‘an artistic laboratory … in which new works are presented and developed, in which musicians from all over the world find a forum for exchange and experimentation’. As in previous years, the Summer Course took place at various locations around Darmstadt city, which ensured the establishment of a vibrant learning environment. In turn, Darmstadt the ‘Wissenschaftsstadt’, or ‘City of Science’, also inspired old and new musical debate.

Ilan Volkov's Tectonics series continues to break new ground in contemporary music programming and curating. Tectonics has now seen its third edition in Glasgow, where Volkov conducts the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and has also sprung up in other locations to which he has connections – beginning in his home city of Tel Aviv, the series has spread also to Reykjavik, Adelaide and New York. The common theme is a blend of new commissions (usually orchestral works), important recent works, and performances from figures from other areas of avant-garde music making – free improvisation, electronic music and the outer fringes of noise and metal.

It seems clear that, by a certain point in the twentieth century, the roles of composer and performer had become increasingly separated, but when we think of composers such as JS Bach, Beethoven and Rachmaninov, we are reminded that the idea of the musician as composer-performer is not new. Today, we can see an increasing number of musicians running a double life as composer and performer. What does it mean to be a composer-performer in the twenty-first century? How does the relationship of compositions to their performances change when the composer is the performer?

The New York Philharmonic Orchestra, under its Music Director Alan Gilbert, spent a week in residence at the Barbican Centre in April, giving four concerts and various other events. Among them was ‘CONTACT!’, a concert of chamber music performed by members of the NYPO in the Guildhall's Milton Court Concert Hall on 18 April 2015. There were five pieces for various small groups. Three were new to the UK, and I will focus on these.

Unsuk Chin's opera Alice in Wonderland is that rare thing: a wholly satisfying artistic event, its multiplicity of meanings resonating in the mind long after the ceaselessly inventive music itself comes to a stop. Most adaptations of such wide-ranging texts focus on one or two aspects of the original, and Chin and her librettist, the playwright David Henry Hwang, sacrifice much of Carroll's playfulness to darken and deepen his message. Their Wonderland retains his virtuosic whimsy, of necessity, but ultimately becomes a fierce, unforgiving, savagely dysfunctional place, as if sieved through Beckett's absurdist nihilism; the humour tiptoes along the edge of an abyss, glancing down nervously.

James MacMillan's new St Luke Passion is unusual. No longer does the Passion story end in the death of its principal character; there's a postlude that sees Christ resurrected. Neither is it peopled with singers acting out the traditional confrontations between Christ, Pilate and the High Priest; it starts instead with a brief setting of the Annunciation text found at the opening of St Luke's gospel. Unusual too is the small size of the orchestra – no trombones or tubas, one set of timpani as the sole percussion and an organ. Perhaps most surprising, however, is that the roles of Christus and Pilate, and indeed everyone else, are given to the choruses: a children's chorus for Christ, the other choirs acting as narrator.

At a seminar on Monday morning, when everything was over at Borealis, Christian Wolff said (I'm paraphrasing), ‘it was easier in the '50s. If you did anything besides follow Stravinsky or Schoenberg, you were beyond the pale. Composers starting now, I don't know what you should do. Everything has been done’.

Cultures collide and combine in the new works presented in the opening weeks of the 2014 BBC Proms. In music by Roxanna Panufnik and Sir John Tavener, ideas from different religious traditions are brought together. Both composers acknowledge the resulting tensions, but seek to transcend them. Various resolutions are proposed, and with them models for mutual understanding. Utopian ideals, indeed, and none of the works quite reach the lofty goals to which they aspire; but, in each case, the journey proves more interesting than the destination.

The madcap, hallucinatory adventures of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan would seem to offer the perfect musico-dramatic vehicle for Richard Ayres. His instrumental works and first formal opera, The Cricket Recovers (2005), are gleeful acts of polystylistic sabotage that might themselves hail from Neverland; the former are often wedded to some strange, dramatic scenario, and the latter is a fantasy about a depressive cricket featuring a would-be tree-climbing elephant. In Ayres's scores, conventional structures, instrumentation and musical materials are juxtaposed, shaken up and hurled about like toys with the accidental radicalism of the child who innocently asks the questions that adults dare not.

A traditional four-movement violin concerto might seem a departure from the grime-influenced crossover language of the composer of the infamous Concerto for Turntables (given its Proms premiere in 2011). However, in many ways Gabriel Prokofiev's first Violin Concerto, commissioned by the BBC for Daniel Hope and the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra, is a highly satisfactory step in the composer's artistic trajectory.